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Case Studies in Cloud Modernization: How five businesses used the cloud to adapt and innovate

See real-world scenarios and hear the successful outcomes of companies that became AI-ready by migrating their data and infrastructure to the cloud. Learn how businesses became more secure and resilient with hybrid and multicloud capabilities from Azure that scale to support all their evolving IT, cybersecurity, and customer needs.

Read Case Studies in Cloud Modernization to learn how five companies:

• Got ready to take advantage of AI by migrating their data and infrastructure to the cloud.
• Enhanced their IT security and compliance across workloads and data with built-in security that enabled them to better adapt to the changing cybersecurity landscape.
• Optimized migration costs and gained competitive advantage with cloud-ready technologies from Azure that provided the ability to scale and grow.

Gayla Sheppard

Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure Data

John Macintyre

Director of Product for Microsoft Azure Analytics

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Microsoft Azure: Benefits, Use Cases, Applications | What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers and a strong competitor of Amazon Web Services. Microsoft Azure has plenty of features that make it one of the crowd’s favourites. In this article let us understand azure basic, Introduction to Azure Essentials , its benefits, use cases, Microsoft azure application and many more.

The following pointers will be touched upon in this article:

• What is Microsoft Azure?
• Benefits of Using Microsoft Azure

Use Cases of Microsoft Azure

 Let us see what the definition of Cloud Computing looks like?

‘Cloud Computing is nothing but a practice of providing Cloud Services (Storage, Computation, Databases, Security, etc) on rent and also through a network that can be accessed over the internet’

Now that we know what the general definition is, let us understand this concept with an example. To understand this definition, we need to go some 20 years back from 2020. In the early two thousand, in order to host an application, we needed to buy stack servers and have skilled professionals to set the infrastructure up. The process looked simple, but there were drawbacks,

• Servers were costly back then, and they still are
• It was difficult to find skilled professionals
• A lot of efforts went into planning

What this meant was the owner had to pay money in buying servers. Then invest more money in people who could set it up. The evening after a lot of planning, there was never certainty on how many resources were enough and how many were too much? As an owner, one would always worry about money resources, planning and scalability. Hence there was very less time one could devote to actually focus on business. Also, this meant setting up such business was becoming limited to ones who could afford it.

This is where Cloud Computing came to save the day. There were service providers in the market that started providing Compute, Storage, Networking, and other application hosting services on ‘pay as you go model’. This meant people could rent these services and pay for only those services they used and only for the time duration they used those for. Also, these services providers managed the configuration, scalability and management part.  In simple terms, this solved all the issues we listed above. This process we just discussed, evolved and started to be known as Cloud Computing.

So by now, you should have an understanding of Cloud Computing. Let us go ahead and understand the next topic

Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud service provider that provides cloud computing services like computation, storage, security and many other domains. Microsoft is one of the global leaders when it comes to Cloud solutions and global cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure provides services in 60+ global regions and serves in 140 counties. It provides services in the form of Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a Service and Software as a service. It even provides serverless computing meaning, you just put your code and all your backend activities as managed by Microsoft Azure.

It easily integrates with Microsoft Products making it very popular using Microsoft products. This platform is now 10 years old and it picked up to compete with the best of the best.

Let us now go ahead and see what benefits Microsoft Azure offers. You can also take up a Microsoft azure certification free course and learn more about the tool that has made an enormous stride in the cloud domain.

Click here to know about Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure may be considered second to Amazon Web Services in few features, but it has quite a few that make it stand tall on its own. Let us take a look at them, one by one

On-Demand Scalability

When we talk of Application Hosting we can never be sure of how many resources are enough and how many are too much. This is the nature of businesses that rely on varying traffics. What is does is forces businesses to plan a lot and invest a lot of money doing it. Microsoft Azure helps you save all this effort.

Microsoft Azure ensures your applications and data is distributed well enough that means you never run short of Server space. It also means your applications do not run on a single server making them available even in dire situations. Since these resources are properly clustered out and they can scale at will and in no time, your applications function very differently then they would in an on-premise architecture.

Cost Effective

One of the major benefits with cloud service providers is the cut down of upfront costs. Since you can configure and scale at will, you are not required to invest heavily here. Microsoft Azure ensures small scale investment does not require upfront costs. Also when it comes to people who have signed up contracts, they get heavy discounts. It also offers to Pay as go, model, meaning you get cost-cutting in the right sense.

Hybrid Environments

They say cloud is not a one fit solution for all. It is true indeed because every business will have its own set of problems. And not all businesses will always be in a state where they can migrate to the cloud entirely. While other platforms suffer here, as people either have to migrate to those platforms or call it off totally, Microsoft Azure benefits with its Hybrid approach. Meaning, with Microsoft Azure you can build Hybrid infrastructures, where your resources can partially reside on the cloud and can partially operate from an on-premise infrastructure. Hence you are safe from costly workaround.

Big data Applications

Hadoop and Big data are the need of the hour. With data increasing exponentially we need applications that can help process this data. Microsoft Azure brings this capability of processing large volumes of data on top of its cloud platform. Azure HDinsight ensures you can use Apache Hadoop as a cloud solution. This is a power-packed service that lets you deal with large data volumes. That means your data crunching becomes easier.

It also readily integrates with data visualization tools and also lets you move your data to excel. This means your data visualization concerns are resolved quickly. With excel you can create visualizations and with PowerBI integrating with Microsoft Azure your data be converted into any visual that you require.

Integration Capabilities

Microsoft has been in the software industry for decades. It has wide reach in the software market and not many can compete with it when it comes to customer base and stack of products it offers. The advantage for Microsoft Azure here is that it readily integrates with most of these products. Be it, connecting to SaaS, PaaS, IaaS applications or even something like Visual Studio or Active Directory, Microsoft Azure has you covered. Hence you can now leverage ERPs and CRMs to enhance your business capacity to a greater level.

So should you be worrying if you do not use Microsoft Products. The answer is ‘NO’. You can even connect to or integrate many third party applications and services to widen your business reach.

Storage and Security

Storage is very critical to any application. It is no different for applications running on cloud. As already discussed, the volume of data we handle these days is huge. It also comes in different formats and from different sources. Your Storage resources have to adept enough to handle this data. Microsoft Azure has you covered here as well It lets you store data in form of files, objects, structured and unstructured data and a lot more. This happens reliable and securely.

Talking of security Microsoft Azure ensures high level of security for your applications. It ensures all the resources in Azure cloud are guarded with firewalls and data is moved over the network with encryption. You have access to authentication and access management meaning you data and application are secure to the core.

Scheduling and Automation

Everyone hates doing repetitive tasks. What if we could automate mundane tasks or recurring tasks be it fetching some data, setting up triggers or scaling your resources when needed? Microsoft Azure does that for you ensuring you can utilise your workforce for more productive outcomes and get rid of stagnancy or repetition of work.

Data Backup and Recovery

Data Backup ensures you have a copy of your data maintained in case if your primary copy of data or resources is lost. With Microsoft Azure, you have an option of backing up your data in different Azure regions or data centres. You can maintain as many as six copies of your data. This signifies that the chance of losing your data on Microsoft Azure is minimal. When it comes to reliability your data is available 99.9 percent.

So this was About the benefits of Microsoft Azure. Let us go ahead see do customers have to about Microsoft Azure and what are some of the popular use cases it has to offer to us.

Microsoft has many popular customers out there, here are some use cases for you,

University Of Toronto

This is the largest Canadian university and leads the global front when it comes to research at an institutional fare. It made use of Microsoft Azure to avoid heavy hardware renewal costs. It migrated some of its activities to Microsoft Azure Cloud. With it, the university managed to transform IT processes, saving a lot of time

AkzoNobel is a popular Dutch Company that leads way in paint and coating business. It serves in more than 100 countries and always needs better connectivity across the globe. It harnessed the power of Microsoft Azure IoT services to improve its performance and connectivity at a global level.

IHG (Intercontinental Hotel Group)

This is one of the largest and leading hotel groups in the world. It owns around 5200 properties across the globe and serves more than a hundred countries. The fact that you own 5200 properties tells you the group holds its values of service very truly and also must have experimented a lot to stay up to date with market needs as well.  This fact is also supported by the fact that this group invests a lot of money in innovations to meet the experience quality the customers deserve.

The company has many of its tools that require Agile practices. It already was based on Azure Cloud platform. This is when they decided to use DevOps Services on Microsoft Azure. This not only helped them bring their software and data handling process on track, but also helped them fortify their security and processing principles. The fact that Microsoft Azure Supports Hybrid cloud meant big group like IHG did not have to move to Azure cloud altogether.

Ever since it has moved to Azure StorSimple, which is a hybrid storage service for enterprises. The group has achieved great results when it comes to storing data. It has helped them save more 70 percent in terms of cost. This is something that was initiated four years ago.  It needed very little support in setting up and does require too much intervention when it comes to administrative attention.

Before they moved to the above-mentioned service, IHG group had to deal with multiple data and file services to gather and store data. Azure StorSimple ensured this data was consolidated and easy to manage overall.  Data Backup issue was also resolved as Azure ensured that easy way to get a snapshot of data. That means data could be backed up easily and quickly.

So this was about different customers and how they used Microsoft Azure to solve their business problems. With this, we have come to the end of this article on Microsoft Azure: Benefits and Use Cases. We hope you liked this article and it has spiked your interest in learning or using Microsoft Azure.  We hope you perceive your Cloud Journey further, Happy Learning!

In case you have any questions, feel free to put those in the comment section and someone from our team will to your queries at the earliest. You can click on the below banner to get a free course on Microsoft Azure.

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Cloud adoption scenarios

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The following scenarios unify technical and non-technical considerations that can help your organization accelerate its overall cloud adoption journey.

Your journey to the cloud can become more nuanced in complexity when you consider the implementation of larger, more complex cloud adoption scenarios that meet your unique business requirements. When you follow these scenarios, you'll encounter key sets of guidance that can help you focus on your requirements. These requirements might enable you to maximize your investment in the cloud. These scenarios include pointed guidance across several areas of cloud adoption best practices from the holistic and modular guidance of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). The workload-specific architectural guidance of the Azure Well-Architected Framework contains reference architectures and example scenarios with deployment templates to implement the solutions. These solutions are based on extensive customer experiences that represent an infrastructure your organization can rely on.

Learn and benefit from a repository of successful cloud adoption experiences and best practices guidance. We collected and codified this guidance from across the Microsoft customer and partner ecosystem. Read on for your answers about cloud adoption, and learn from successful migration and modernization experiences across our customer and partner communities. Let's make the cloud yours.

Looking for migration scenarios? We moved the migration scenarios to a new location. You can find them in the Migration scenarios section.

Components of a cloud adoption scenario

Scenario(s) to support your cloud adoption strategy

Each overview page provides guidance to implement the scenario:

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Case study: Microsoft Azure Cloud experiences in teaching at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences

Volume 3 Issue 2

Senior Lecturer

Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences

Principal Lecturer

Haaga Helia University of Applied Sciences

In November 2019 the digital innovation hub for cloud-based services (DIHUB) project was started, which is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. DIHUB’s aim is to setup a European wide knowledge cluster on cloud-based technologies and services for the needs of innovation development, education and the generation of new start-ups (Aunimo, 2022; Aunimo et al., 2021)

This paper presents a case study on how learning offerings involving the use of Microsoft Azure materials, laboratories and certifications can be designed, piloted and implemented in an institution of higher education. The focus was on using Azure cloud services in part of the teaching curriculum for the degree programme in Business Information Technology at Haaga-Helia. The Azure study offering development was partly possible by being part of the DIHUB project. Developing a cloud curriculum, piloting new courses belonging to the curriculum and gathering feedback from them were important activities of the project (Aunimo et al., 2022).

Keywords : Cloud Computing, Azure, AWS, DIHUB, Microsoft Learn, Artificial Intelligence

1. Introduction

Digital Technology is changing at an ever-rapid pace and it can be difficult to keep on top of all the new developments. One of the key areas of this change is the use of cloud computing for delivery of essential computing services over the internet such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and artificial intelligence. The main big three companies that offer cloud computing platform services are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP).

Between 2017 and 2020 employers in the USA have posted over 790,000 jobs requiring cloud computing skills, with employer demand for cloud professionals increasing nearly 150% during this timeframe (Duke Learning Innovation, 2021). Therefore, it is essential students have some understanding of how cloud computing works, so they try to gain industry-related cloud computing skills to help them find cloud computing jobs both in the present and the future (Careerera, 2021).

In previous studies in the delivery of cloud computing, the key conclusions have been that technology is novel and affordable for small business operations (Olakunle et el., 2022). Also, cloud computing has been attracting more attention in recent times because it shifts on how skills and IT resources are provisioned (Rekik et al., 2019). In some education organizations, the focus is on the study of individual cloud platforms, while others involve the study of the theoretical foundations of cloud technologies. For example, at Harvard University, students study a course in Fundamentals of Cloud Computing by learning the key features of the Microsoft Azure platform as a service (Harvard University, 2022). At the University of Helsinki, students take the Cloud Computing Fundamental AWS course, to prepare students for the advanced AWS Developer Associate Certification (University of Helsinki, 2018).

At Middlesbrough College cloud computing is taught in a conceptual method where students design and develop cloud infrastructures for different business scenarios. The students learn through active blended learning and lab-based activities. The students are assessed by a mixture of assignments and examinations at all levels (Middlesbrough College, 2022).

This paper is organized as follows. After this introduction there will be a brief introduction of the importance of cloud technologies in education and the second section will outline the aims of this case study. The third section discusses the methodology for this case study. The fourth section presents results and discusses the findings. Lastly, section five presents the conclusions and limitations of the study.

2. Aim of the study

At the start of the autumn semester 2021 Haaga-Helia’s Digital Business department started the pilot of two Azure Fundamentals-level courses with Microsoft MSLE Institute Program. Haaga-Helia joined the MSLE Institute program at start of 2021 as a full member.

The key aims of this case study pilot were:

• How to use the MS Azure Portal for Microsoft cloud business services in teaching?
• How to teach artificial intelligence and the used of AI services using MS Azure?
• How to support DIHUB’s aim in setup of a European wide knowledge cluster on cloud-based technologies and services?

The new pilot Azure courses; AZ-900 and AI-900 were incorporated into two Haaga-Helia academic ICT Business courses each worth 5 ECTS credits, to offer students in these classes the possibility to acquire certification in Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certifications. These two classes were selected as their student enrolment numbers were small, which made it easier for the instructors to pilot the certifications for the first time. The course instructors also had access to the official Microsoft instructor support materials on the MSLE learning download center portal (https://aka.ms/LDC), which is designed to support instructor’s delivery of the courses to students. The most common method for course topic creation at Haaga-Helia, is the instructor creating the content, but for these two Foundation Azure courses the learning materials are created by Microsoft. For any MSLE Foundation courses the instructor doesn’t have to be certified to deliver the course, although the MSLE recommends instructors obtain a certification.

Each course enabled Haaga-Helia students to prepare for taking optional certifications with Microsoft, as part of Haaga-Helia’s commitment with participation in the Microsoft Learn for Educators Institute program.

3. Methodology

By participating in the Microsoft Learn for Educators Institute program (MSLE) Haaga-Helia was allocated a personal training program manager, who provided online guidance and support meetings to instructors for delivery of the courses. The meetings were used to discuss the requirements of the courses, process for designing of the content and implementation of the courses. In addition to the MSLE program manager support, feedback was collected from students at the end of the course implementation.

In addition to the Microsoft Fundamentals study pilots, Haaga-Helia became an authorized test centre with CertiPort, that allow certifications to take place with an authorized exam proctor. The GMetrix.net platform (GMetrix, 2022) was used to run practice questions and test simulations in preparation for the certifications with CertiPort. Out of the 12 possible Microsoft Fundamental courses it was decided to select the following two courses, as they were the closest match in terms of course content, for two ICT courses already in place at Haaga-Helia:

• M icrosoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals ICT8TF052 : Microsoft Learn Azure Fundamentals AZ-900, Senior Lecturer Harri Ahola (Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, 2022b)
• Basics of AI BIG8TN001-3015 : Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals AI-900, Senior Lecturer Darren Trofimczuk (Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, 2022a)

The implementations for both Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) and the Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals (AZ-900) courses were split over 12 weeks (Autumn was only 8 weeks and was extended to 12 weeks during Spring 2022), with a weekly 3hr – 4hr online workshop in Microsoft Teams facilitated by the course instructor. Students were also provided with online lab tasks in an Azure portal using their authenticated Microsoft student account, in addition to online study materials provided by the instructor and Microsoft’s learning portal. Before the start of each class students had to submit a diary of lab task evidence and their topic course material notes. Near the final stages of the implementation students had to complete at least two online training tests using GMetrix and submit their score percentages evidence to the course instructors. In the final week of the implementation students were offered the chance to take a certification exam using CertiPort.

The pilot implementation of Azure Fundamentals – Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals – ICT8TF052-3001 had the following strict passing and grading requirements:

The examination fee for each AZ-900 and AI-900 exam is usually set at $99, but these fees are exempted for students when vouchers codes are activated by the course instructor in the MSLE. Each student uses the exam voucher when taking the exam in the official CertiPort test centre, which required students to create an official Microsoft Certification profile with their personal detailed information. This sharing of student personal contact details for external organization (Microsoft and CertiPort) was the reason we decided to require only GMetrix.net practice exams as part of the course grade. Gemetrix.net do not require students to share their personal information with practise test centre and we can use university emails as logins for students.

The pilot implementation of Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals – BIG8TN001-3014 had the following strict passing and grading requirements:

4. Result/findings and argumentation

The feedback from students was collected as a series of questions at the end of the course using Haaga-Helia’s official electronic feedback tool called Peppi, which is sent to all student emails as a reminder at the end of the course. The feedback is spilt into a series of questions with a grading scale answer option for each and a section at the end for students to write their general course feedback. All student feedback is collated into the Peppi feedback system for the course teacher, so an analysis of the results can take place and can be shared with program directors.

4.1 Azure AI Fundamentals AI-900

For the Azure AI Fundamental course student feedback was mostly positive and many felt they had improved on their understanding of Artificial Intelligence concepts and how to use the Microsoft Azure platform. As the course progressed some students felt the course required more study time than they initially anticipated and began to struggle keeping up with the weekly study materials and lab tasks, so there were three students who gave up studying the AI-900 option. Near completion of the implementation most students opted to take the training test, rather than take optional official Microsoft Certification exam. For those students who submitted diary notes and lab evidence for all five AI module topics, were awarded the 5 ECTS credits for completing the Haaga-Helia Basics of AI BIG8TN001-3015 course.

In total there were two students from the class who decided to take the certification with Microsoft. These two students unfortunately didn’t pass as their scores were just below (68% and 61%) the 70% pass requirement for the AI-900 certification. In any future courses a more thorough guidance description will be provided, to help ensure students who choose to study the AI-900 course are much better aware what they are getting themselves into before agreeing to take this study option. It is also advisable that students who study Microsoft AI Azure Fundamentals have some background knowledge preferably in computing technology, as the student group used in this pilot group were third semester students studying the International Business Degree program.

4.2 Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals: AZ-900:

Autumn 2022 implementation “Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals – ICT8TF052-3001” was the first pilot course to implement the full Azure Fundamentals official certifications preparation course at Haaga-Helia in co-operation with Dihub and MSLE Institute. This first pilot implementation was scheduled for 8 calendar weeks with minimum 3-4 hours weekly face to face teaching using Teams video conferencing and Teams for education tooling e.g., “Teams Student Workbooks”. The student had to book at least same amount of time per week for studying on their own using the “Learn- Microsoft” official documentation portal and provided “Azure for Students” Azure-subscription to do the 20+ compulsory hands-on labs.

The main motivation for Haaga-Helia to pilot the new Azure courses were to decide whether to adopt MSLE Institute Azure courses (Microsoft’s current offering for Academic Institutions contains over dozen cloud certification courses from fundamentals to Associate level certification – see link to Azure Certification poster (Azure Certifications, 2022). If the MSLE courses pilot proves successful, it would then complement the existing full AWS certification course offering (AWS certifications, 2022) from fundamentals up to professional level, which have been standard inclusion in ICT bachelor curriculum for three years at Haaga-Helia. The Microsoft Cloud certified students and professionals are in really high demand on job markets in Finland, where Azure has a lead position in public cloud offerings, and we have seen a high demand on Azure certifications by our students and our SME partners in the ongoing Dihub-project.

5. Analysis and Discussion

This section will be arranged into three sub-headings and use the key aim questions, specified at the start the case study, as their headings. The findings from the pilot case study will be used to answer the research questions.

5.1 How to use the MS Azure Portal for Microsoft cloud business services in teaching?

This first pilot of Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals 5 ECTS course was positive. Initially 22 students starting, 12 students passing with a grade and 7 of them were granted the official AZ-900 certifications. The student feedback for the implementation was mostly positive and students found it extra motivating to have the opportunity to study industry recognized certifications. Students found the lectured topics to be interesting and vital for the coming work role as ICT/Cloud specialists. Most of the students subscribed for more advanced cloud courses on Azure and AWS, couple of the students even continued their cloud specialist studies as bachelor thesis workers in our cloud laboratory.

Based on these Azure and AI Fundamentals pilot courses, and the received student feedback during them, we have extended the 2022 Azure and AI Fundamentals implementations to be 12 calendar weeks and to include foundational networking, virtualisation and AI primers as extra material added to the Microsoft official certification materials.

5.2 How to teach artificial intelligence and the used of AI services using MS Azure?

At the start of the Autumn 2022 semester the AI-900 preparation course will be offered as an intensive 10-week course option track in the Basics of AI course- implementation (Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, 2022). In this implementation 40 enrolment spaces will be available for students to sign up from a bigger range of degree groups such as the campus online students. The hope is a higher number of students choose to take the Microsoft Certification exam scheduled for the fall of 2022, after they finish completing the study materials embedded inside the Basics of AI course.

5.3 How to support DIHUB’s aim in setup of a European wide knowledge cluster on cloud-based technologies and services?

As of Spring 2022 both Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals (AZ-900) and Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) have been adopted to be part of standard ICT curriculums of Haaga-Helia leading to cloud specialists work roles. The partnership between Haaga-Helia and MSLE Institute has evolved into totally new heights with piloting of official Associate level certification courses e.g., Azure Cloud Administrator AZ-104 including the use of Microsoft Skillable labs. We have also hired more instructors to teach more cloud courses both on AWS and Microsoft Cloud Academies.

6. Conclusions

This paper described which courses from the vast offering have been proven to be a good starting point when an educational institution wishes to extend its course offerings on cloud technologies focusing on AI. The selected courses are: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals and Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals, both worth 5 ECTS credits. Student feedback was generally positive, and one lesson learned was an extension of a few extra weeks on top of the 8 weeks recommended study time suggested by Microsoft, would be extra beneficial for the students studying the Azure AI Fundamentals course. The reasoning behind a few weeks’ extra weeks study time, was because students generally felt there was too much study material to get through in an 8-week study period. In addition, it was found that a preparatory course on Azure AI could be offered to a wider range of students – including also non-IT students.

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the Dihub project (11/2019 – 4/2022), funded by the Erasmus+, Sector Skills Alliances program of the European Commission.

Aunimo, L. (2022). Dihub created cloud services study contents. E-Signals. https://esignals.fi/en/category-en/r-d/dihub-created-cloud-services-study-contents/

Aunimo, L., Brkljacic, M., Lintilä, T., Camara, A., & Mrsic, L. (2022). CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT FOR CLOUD SERVICES: ANSWERING THE NEEDS OF THE JOB MARKET. EDULEARN 2022 Proceedings , 4197–4202. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2022.1005

Aunimo, L., Hytönen, J., Ahola, H., Hokkanen, H., & Häkkinen, K. (2021). THE DIHUB MODEL FOR LEARNING AND INNOVATING. INTED2021 Proceedings , 9993–9998. https://doi.org/10.21125/inted.2021.2086

AWS certifications. (2022). AWS certification offerings . https://aws.amazon.com/training/?nc2=sb_tc

Azure certifications. (2022). Azure certification offerings. https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE2PjDI

Careerera. (2021). Why Are Cloud Computing Jobs In Serious Demand Today? https://www.careerera.com/blog/why-are-cloud-computing-jobs-in-serious-demand-today

Datamation. (2021). Top Cloud Service Providers & Companies of 2021 . https://www.datamation.com/cloud/cloud-service-providers/

Duke Learning Innovation. (2021). https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2021/05/3-reasons-to-learn-cloud-computing-today/

GMetrix. 2022. https://www.gmetrix.net

Haaga-Helia DIHUB. (2022). https://www.haaga-helia.fi/en/rdi-projects/dihub-digital-innovation-hub

Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. (2022a). Basics of AI. https://opinto-opas.haaga-helia.fi/course_unit/BIG8TN001

Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. (2022b). Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals. https://opinto-opas.haaga-helia.fi/course_unit/ICT8TF052

Harvard University, 2022. Fundamentals of Cloud Computing with Microsoft Azure . https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/fundamentals-cloud-computing-microsoft-azure

Microsoft Learn Azure AI Fundamentals. (2022). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-ai-fundamentals/

Microsoft Learn Azure Fundamentals. (2022). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900

Middlesbrough College. (2022). IT and Computing. https://www.mbro.ac.uk/career-choices/it-computing-and-digital-technologies

Olakunle Jayeola, Shafie Sidek, Azmawani Abd Rahman, Anuar Shah Bali Mahomed, & Jimin Hu. (2022). Cloud Computing Adoption in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): A Systematic Literature Review and Directions for Future Research. International Journal of Business and Society (pp 226-243). Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. https://doi.org/10.33736/ijbs.4610.2022

Rekik, M., Boukadi, K., & Ben-Abdallah, H. (2019). An end-to-end system to enhance business process performance through new outsourcing to the cloud strategies. International Journal of Business and Systems Research (pp 1–20). Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJBSR.2019.10016500

University of Helsinki. (May 31 2018). Cloud Computing Fundamentals: AWS. https://courses.helsinki.fi/en/data20003/122093146

Peer reviewers:

Principal Lecturer Metropolia University of Applied Sciences

Juha-Tapio Teno Senior Lecturer JAMK University of Applied Sciences

Viittausohje:

Trofimzuk, D., Ahola, H. & Aunimo, L. (2022).Case study: Microsoft Azure Cloud experiences in teaching at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. eSignals Research, 3 (2). http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi – fe2022122173047

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Designed by Microsoft in 2010, Microsoft Azure is one of the widely used cloud computing platforms. Azure provides a wide variety of services such as cloud storage, compute services, network services, cognitive services, databases, analytics, and IoT. It makes building, deploying, and managing applications very easy. All the Microsoft Azure fundamentals are also described for a better understanding of readers.

What is Azure?

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, just like Google has its Google Cloud and Amazon has its Amazon Web Service or AWS.000. Generally, it is a platform through which we can use Microsoft’s resources. For example, to set up a huge server, we will require huge investment, effort, physical space, and so on. In such situations, Microsoft Azure comes to our rescue. It will provide us with virtual machines, fast processing of data, analytical and monitoring tools, and so on to make our work simpler. The pricing of Azure is also simpler and cost-effective. Popularly termed as “Pay As You Go” , which means how much you use, pay only for that.

How Does Microsoft Azure Work?

It is a private and public cloud platform that helps developers and IT professionals to build deploy and manage the application. It uses the technology known as virtualization. Virtualization separates the tight coupling between the hardware and the operating system using an abstraction layer called a hypervisor. Hypervisor emulates all the functions of a computer in the virtual machine, it can run multiple virtual machines at the same time and each virtual machine can run any operating system such as Windows or Linux. Azure takes this virtualization technique and repeats it on a massive scale in the data center owned by Microsoft. Each data center has many racks filled with servers and each server includes a hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines. The network switch provides connectivity to all those servers.

Azure will provide the Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform which offers

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
• Platform as a service (PaaS).
• Software as a service (SaaS).

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Virtual machines, storage, and networking will come under the category of infrastructure as a service but the users have to do manually the build and deploy of the applications. Azure will support a wide range of operating systems because of its Hyper-hypervisor.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Azure app service, Azure functions, and logic apps are some services that are offered by Azure under the platform as a service. This service will provide autoscaling and load balancing and also there will be a pre-configured environment for the application.

Software as a service (SaaS)

Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure Active Directory are some of the services provided by Microsoft Azure under Software as a Service (SaaS) the complete application will be managed by the Microsoft azure including deploying, scaling and load balancing.

What is a public cloud? Everything you need to know

Computing in which service provider makes all resources public over the internet. It is connected to the public Internet. Service provider serves resources such as virtual machines, applications, storage, etc to the general public over the internet. It may be free of cost or with minimal pay-per-usage. It is available for public display, Google uses the cloud to run some of its applications like google docs, google drive or YouTube, etc.  It is the most common way of implementing cloud computing. The external cloud service provider owns, operates, and delivers it over the public network. It is best for the companies which need an infrastructure to accommodate a large number of customers and work on projects which have diverse organizations i.e. research institutions and NGOs etc. 

Key Characteristics of Public Clouds:

• Accessibility
• Scalability
• Cost-effectiveness
• Reliability

What Is Microsoft Azure Used For?

Following are the some the use cases that Microsoft Azure Used.

• Deployment Of applications: You can develop and deploy the application in the azure cloud by using the service called Azure App Service and Azure Functions after deploying the applications end users can access it.
• Identity and Access Managment: The application and data which is deployed and stored in the Microsoft Azure can be secured with the help of Identity and Access Managment. It’s commonly used for single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and identity governance.
• Data Storage and Databases: You can store the data in Microsoft azure in service like blob storage for unstructured data, table storage for NoSQL data, file storage, and Azure SQL Database for relational databases. The service can be scaled depending on the amount of data we are getting.
• DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Azure DevOps will provide some tools like ncluding version control, build automation, release management, and application monitoring.

Azure for DR and Backup

A full range of disaster recovery (DR) and backup services are available from Microsoft Azure to help shield your vital data and apps from interruptions. With the help of these services, you may quickly restore your data and applications in the event of a disaster by replicating them to a secondary cloud site. Azure backup services also protect your data from ransomware attacks, unintentional deletion, and corruption.

Key Azure DR and Backup Services

• Azure Site Recovery: Your on-premises virtual machines (VMs) can be replicated to Azure more easily with the help of this solution. You may easily failover your virtual machines (VMs) to Azure in the event of a disaster and keep your business running. Azure VM replication to an alternative Azure region is also supported by Azure Site Recovery.
• Azure Backup: If you want to protect the data which is present in the cloud then you need to use the Azure Backup service. It offers a single area to monitor backup jobs, manage backup policies, and recover data.Azure pricing and costs.

Azure competition

Following are the some of the competitors of Microsoft Azure:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Alibaba Cloud.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Azure History

Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure in early October 2008 but it went to live after February 2010. Later in 2014, Microsoft changed its name from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. Azure provided a service platform for .NET services, SQL Services, and many Live Services. Many people were still very skeptical about “the cloud”. As an industry, we were entering a brave new world with many possibilities. Microsoft Azure is getting bigger and better in the coming days. More tools and more functionalities are being added. It has two releases as of now. It’s a famous version of Microsoft Azure v1 and later Microsoft Azure v2 . Microsoft Azure v1 was more JSON script-driven than the new version v2, which has interactive UI for simplification and easy learning. Microsoft Azure v2 is still in the preview version.

How Azure can help in business?

Azure can help our business in the following ways-

• Capital less: We don’t have to worry about the capital as Azure cuts out the high cost of hardware. You simply pay as you go and enjoy a subscription-based model that’s kind to your cash flow. Also, setting up an Azure account is very easy. You simply register in Azure Portal and select your required subscription and get going.
• Less Operational Cost: Azure has a low operational cost because it runs on its servers whose only job is to make the cloud functional and bug-free, it’s usually a whole lot more reliable than your own, on-location server.
• Cost Effective: If we set up a server on our own, we need to hire a tech support team to monitor them and make sure things are working fine. Also, there might be a situation where the tech support team is taking too much time to solve the issue incurred in the server. So, in this regard is way too pocket-friendly.
• Easy Back-Up and Recovery options: Azure keeps backups of all your valuable data. In disaster situations, you can recover all your data in a single click without your business getting affected. Cloud-based backup and recovery solutions save time, avoid large up-front investments and roll up third-party expertise as part of the deal.
• Easy to implement: It is very easy to implement your business models in Azure. With a couple of on-click activities, you are good to go. Even there are several tutorials to make you learn and deploy faster.
• Better Security: Azure provides more security than local servers. Be carefree about your critical data and business applications. As it stays safe in the Azure Cloud. Even, in natural disasters, where the resources can be harmed, Azure is a rescue. The cloud is always on.
• Work from anywhere: Azure gives you the freedom to work from anywhere and everywhere. It just requires a network connection and credentials. And with most serious Azure cloud services offering mobile apps, you’re not restricted to which device you’ve got to hand.
• Increased collaboration: With Azure, teams can access, edit and share documents anytime, from anywhere. They can work and achieve future goals hand in hand. Another advantage of Azure is that it preserves records of activity and data. Timestamps are one example of Azure’s record-keeping. Timestamps improve team collaboration by establishing transparency and increasing accountability.

What are the Various Azure Services and How does Azure Work?

Following are some of the services Microsoft Azure offers:

• Compute: Includes Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Functions for serverless computing, Batch for containerized batch workloads, Service Fabric for microservices and container orchestration, and Cloud Services for building cloud-based apps and APIs.
• Networking: With Azure, you can use a variety of networking tools, like the Virtual Network, which can connect to on-premise data centers; Load Balancer; Application Gateway; VPN Gateway; Azure DNS for domain hosting, Content Delivery Network, Traffic Manager, ExpressRoute dedicated private network fiber connections; and Network Watcher monitoring and diagnostics
• Storage: Includes Blob, Queue, File, and Disk Storage, as well as a Data Lake Store, Backup, and Site Recovery, among others.
• Web + Mobile: Creating Web + Mobile applications is very easy as it includes several services for building and deploying applications.
• Containers: Azure has a property that includes Container Service, which supports Kubernetes, DC/OS or Docker Swarm, and Container Registry, as well as tools for microservices.
• Databases: Azure also included several SQL-based databases and related tools.
• Data + Analytics: Azure has some big data tools like HDInsight for Hadoop Spark, R Server, HBase, and Storm clusters
• AI + Cognitive Services: With Azure developing applications with artificial intelligence capabilities, like the Computer Vision API, Face API, Bing Web Search, Video Indexer, and Language Understanding Intelligent.
• Internet of Things: Includes IoT Hub and IoT Edge services that can be combined with a variety of machine learning, analytics, and communications services.
• Security + Identity: Includes Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Key Vault, and Multi-Factor Authentication Services.
• Developer Tools: Includes cloud development services like Visual Studio Team Services, Azure DevTest Labs, HockeyApp mobile app deployment and monitoring, Xamarin cross-platform mobile development, and more.

Difference between AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud, and Azure

Faqs on microsoft azure, 1. microsoft azure student.

If you are an student then Microsoft azure will provide the free access to the variety of service like. compute. storage. networking.

2. Microsoft Azure Cerification

The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification covers various topics related to cloud computing, cloud concepts, and Azure services. The exam tests your understanding of Azure architecture, management, governance, and security. The AZ-900 certification, also known as Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, is an entry-level certification that validates foundational knowledge of cloud concepts and Microsoft Azure services. To obtain the certificate, you will need to pass the AZ-900 exam. An exam can be taken by anyone interested in gaining a basic understanding of cloud computing( Microsoft Azure), regardless of their technical background or job role. It is also useful for particular individuals who are new to Azure and want to start their journey in cloud computing and DevOps.

3. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer

Azure Storage Account is a storage account that is a resource that acts as a container that groups all the data services from Azure storage (Azure blobs, Azure files, Azure Queues, and Azure Tables). This helps us manage all of them as a group. The policies we specify while creating the storage account or making changes after the creation applies to all the services inside the account. Deleting a storage account deletes all the storage services deployed and the data stored inside it.

4. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a standalone application which provide the user GUI to manage the azure storage. It supports Blob Storage , Table Storage, Queue Storage, and File Storage.

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swXtch.io's cloudSwXtch delivers high-performance networking on Azure

Microsoft partner swXtch.io’s cloudSwXtch allows companies to transport live, broadcast-quality video streams and hit line-rate network throughput.

Companies hesitant to move workflows

A true multicast solution based on azure, millions of packets per second, a microsoft partner bolstering the azure network.

Based in New York City, swXtch.io specializes in technology for the media and entertainment industry. The company's involvement with Azure came about in response to a request from the Azure Global Engineering team to add multicast to the Azure network. A demo of cloudSwXtch in November 2020 led to ongoing engagement, with swXtch.io becoming transactable in the Microsoft commercial marketplace the following spring. Supported by the Azure sales team, swXtch.io expanded into other vertical markets, including financial services, government, and IoT, and became part of the Microsoft live-media workflow at the 2022 International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. “Our Microsoft partnership has exposed us to a much broader number of customer prospects than we ever could’ve achieved without them,” said Geeter Kyrazis, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of swXtch.io. cloudSwXtch is a network appliance that is deployed as a virtual machine image so it can be created with any tools that create VMs. The cloudSwXtch VM Image page  in the Azure Marketplace connects professionals with templates to easily deploy cloudSwXtch on an Azure virtual machine and test its functionality on a pay-as-you-go basis. The templates ensure correct setup of the VM and network interfaces.

Speed and stability are here in the cloud

Transitioning to the cloud usually results in two choices for a company: making a solution to fill the gaps in cloud networking or buying such a solution. Making a solution can take years, but with the networking expertise of swXtch.io and its cloudSwXtch solution, companies can expect their timelines to go from years to weeks, or even days, for full implementation. Thanks to cloudSwXtch, organizations accustomed to high-performance networking on-premises will find the cloud familiar. cloudSwXtch offers microsecond latencies and high bandwidth throughput at a scale similar to bare-metal networks. With an emphasis on live-media production, cloudSwXtch implements network path redundancy (SMPTE 2022-7), Precision Time Protocol, standards conversion with Tachyon LIVE, and remote production collaboration. cloudSwXtch takes any supported packet protocol (SRT, RIST, unicast, multicast) and fans it out to multiple receivers of another packet protocol. “cloudSwXtch creates a wealth of new possibilities for live-media workflows in hybrid and cloud environments," said Brent Yates, CEO and co-founder of swXtch.io. "The Azure cloud, enhanced with cloudSwXtch, becomes a powerful destination for broadcast media customers that require high-performance networking capabilities in order to thrive.” For video distribution, the number of supported endpoints outside the cloud is the exact multiple of the egress cost savings. For example, if a broadcaster wants to distribute its channel to multiple locations in another cloud, each external connection can be replaced by a single outbound flow and then fanned out in the cloud infrastructure using multicast. A single 100 megabyte-per-second stream going to 30 processing endpoints will equal $900,000 of savings in egress costs.

“The Azure cloud, enhanced with cloudSwXtch, becomes a powerful destination for broadcast media customers that require high-performance networking capabilities in order to thrive.”

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• Sep 6, 2021

Customer Case Study - read the success story on Cloud Adoption with Microsoft Azure.

PROTORIA modernizes its IT infrastructure with Microsoft Azure and the guidance of Cloud Services.

PROTORIA , the retail service provider for Samsung in Ukraine, wanted to update its long-term strategy with cloud adoption plans. Cloud Services served as PROTORIA’s trusted advisor and migration partner in this endeavor. What began with a workshop grew to a three-year collaboration involving migrating PROTORIA’s infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. Now PROTORIA uses Azure, Office 365, and Microsoft Power BI every day and saves about 20 percent each year on costs.

Looking ahead to a digital future

PROTORIA operates more than retail 30 stores in Ukraine and actively develops an omnichannel customer experience. PROTORIA is also the country's retail service provider for the Samsung electronics chain. As part of managing its multichannel retail challenges, PROTORIA decided to review its digital assets and update its long-term strategy. One of the priorities PROTORIA's stakeholders identified during digital asset rationalization was modernization of the IT infrastructure and the main retail website to make adopting a digital customer experience fast and easy. PROTORIA connected with Cloud Services, a Microsoft partner based in Ukraine with an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider accreditation. Cloud Services’ managed service offerings help clients easily consume Azure and benefit from agile consumption-based models. Cloud Services proposed its Cloud Adoption Framework workshop (CAF), a four-hour session for business and tech leaders. ”During the CAF session, all CAF stages were worked out, and we understood the importance of setting up the right landing zone at the very beginning,” said Olga Khichii, COO of PROTORIA . “We agreed on commencing an infrastructure assessment, which helped us find relevant workloads to migrate to Microsoft Azure to get the most out of cloud benefits at the beginning of the cloud journey.” The session helped PROTORIA create a cloud adoption plan, and the infrastructure and security assessments determined migration scenarios and calculated costs. Additionally, Cloud Services indicated mission-critical priorities for the company for next three years: • Infrastructure as a Service, including support for cloud governance and cloud operations • Legacy web application modernization • High resiliency for web applications • Cost efficiency • Modernization of data analytics

Embracing the cloud and saving 20 percent each year During the first year, PROTORIA migrated its on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) and relational database systems, and that resulted in infrastructure and administration savings. In the second year, PROTORIA migrated its website to Azure App Service and Docker containers to benefit from greater scalability, resiliency, and security. Finally, in the third year, PROTORIA optimized its analytics and data warehouse by migrating to Azure Synapse from on-premises SQL. PROTORIA also embraced Microsoft Power BI reporting for analytics, transitioning from Microsoft Excel and downloading ERP reports.

“We had a profound business plan for cloud adoption,” said Iryna Moiseyeva, CEO of Cloud Services. “During three years of collaboration, we migrated the customer’s infrastructure to Azure, modernized their web app and data warehouse, and set up analytics on Azure Synapse and Power BI.”

Today, PROTORIA uses Azure, Office 365 , and Power BI on an everyday basis. Azure services include Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake, Azure Key Vault, Azure Application Insights, and Azure Log Analytics workspace. PROTORIA monitors store traffic, collects customer reviews, and analyzes sales and inventory. PROTORIA can look at planned and past periods for each product group and compare online sales to in-person sales. Azure Synapse and Power BI reports are generated and updated swiftly. The NPS report is updated every 15 minutes, receiving store reviews from buyers. Reports are available for headquarters workers as well as retail store staff. “The main benefits we got with moving to Azure,” said Khichii, “is not only cost savings, which is around 20 percent yearly, but continuous cloud operation support from our partner: a long-term plan that we execute step by step. That gives us understanding and opportunities to provide to our customers better service and a great experience both in offline and online shopping.”

Read more success stories with Microsoft Azure

Learn more about Cloud Adoption Framework Workshop for organizations

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Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID

New name, same powerful capabilities.

5 ways to secure identity and access in the age of AI.

Help your organization be better prepared for the opportunities and challenges ahead by adopting a comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy that spans identity, endpoint, and network.

Manage and protect with Microsoft Entra ID

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Microsoft Entra ID empowers organizations to manage and secure identities so employees, partners, and customers can access the applications and services they need. Microsoft Entra ID provides an identity solution that integrates broadly, from on-premises legacy apps to thousands of top software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, delivering a seamless end-user experience and improved visibility and control.

Consistently recognized as a Leader by industry analysts

Microsoft recognized for seventh year

Microsoft is a seven-time Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management. 1 , 2

A leader in access management

Learn why KuppingerCole rates Microsoft a strong positive across all product and leadership dimensions in access management. 3

2022 Company of the Year for Global Identity and Access Management

Frost & Sullivan has named Microsoft the 2022 Company of the Year for the Global Identity and Access Management industry. 4

See why more than 300,000 organizations use Microsoft Entra ID

Get started with microsoft entra id, microsoft entra id p2.

Get comprehensive identity and access management capabilities including identity protection, privileged identity management, and self-service access management for end users. Azure AD Premium P2 is now Microsoft Entra ID P2.

Microsoft Entra ID P1

Get the fundamentals of identity and access management, including single sign-on, multifactor authentication, passwordless and conditional access, and other features. Azure AD Premium P1 is now Microsoft Entra ID P1.

The free edition of Microsoft Entra ID is included with a subscription of a commercial online service such as Azure, Dynamics 365, Intune, Power Platform, and others.

Discover the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Entra

Microsoft Entra ID increases worker productivity and reduces IT friction. Fifty percent of teams increased identity and access management team efficiency. End–user productivity increased by 13 hours per year and password reset requests decreased by 75 percent.

Explore the Microsoft Entra product family

Safeguard connections between people, apps, resources, and devices with multicloud identity and network access products.

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Microsoft entra id (formerly azure active directory).

Manage and protect users, apps, workloads, and devices.

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Issue and verify identity credentials based on open standards.

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Manage identity permissions across your multicloud infrastructure.

Microsoft Entra Workload ID

Help apps and services to securely access cloud resources.

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Microsoft entra internet access.

Secure access to internet, software as a service, and Microsoft 365 apps.

Microsoft Entra Private Access

Help users to securely connect to private apps from anywhere.

Additional resources for Microsoft Entra ID

Azure ad is now microsoft entra id.

Microsoft Entra ID is the new name for Azure AD. All licensing and functionality remain the same. No action is required from you.

Microsoft Entra blog

Stay up to date with the latest news about identity and network access product.

The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Entra

Learn how an organization achieved a three-year 240% ROI with Microsoft Entra in this 2023 commissioned Forrester Consulting study. 5

Technical documentation

Explore all the features in Microsoft Entra ID, and view how-to guides, tutorials, and quick-start guides.

Frequently asked questions

What is azure ad what is microsoft entra id.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), now known as Microsoft Entra ID, is an identity and access management solution from Microsoft that helps organizations secure and manage identities for hybrid and multicloud environments.

Is Azure AD free? How about Microsoft Entra ID?

Azure AD, now known as Microsoft Entra ID, has a free edition that provides user and group management, on-premises directory synchronization, basic reports, self-service password change for cloud users, and single sign-on across Azure, Microsoft 365, and many popular SaaS apps. The free edition is included with a subscription of a commercial online service such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Intune, or Power Platform.

What are the Azure AD licenses?

Azure AD is now known as Microsoft Entra ID, but the licenses and service plans remain the same—Free, P1, and P2.

What’s the new name for Azure AD?

The new name for Azure AD is Microsoft Entra ID. The name is changing, but the capabilities, licensing, and pricing remain the same. No action is required for existing customers.

What happened to Azure AD?

The name changed. Microsoft offers and supports the capabilities and service level agreements of Azure AD under the new name of Microsoft Entra ID, which was announced on June 20, 2023.

Get started

Safeguard your organization with a seamless identity and access management solution.

• [1] Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
• [2] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Access Management, Henrique Teixeira, Abhyuday Data, Nathan Harris, Robertson Pimentel. 16 November 2023.
• [3] KuppingerCole, Leadership Compass: Access Management 2022, Richard Hill, April 26, 2022.
• [4] Frost and Sullivan, Microsoft 2022 Company of the Year, Global Identity and Access Management Industry, 2022.
• [5] Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Entra: Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Microsoft Entra, commissioned by Microsoft, March 2023. Results are for a composite organization based on eight organizations as stated in the linked study.

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Optimize your microsoft azure virtual desktop and windows 365 experience, boost azure virtual desktop capabilities.

Simplify app and image management, optimize user experience, and gain more value by leveraging the cost-effectiveness of Windows 11 Enterprise multi-session while supporting hybrid deployments with Azure and on-premises workloads.

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First-id and Microsoft Advertising unlock new audiences with Publisher Provided ID (PPID)

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